Congratulations, .Co. Now the Real Work Begins.
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
Relaunch was successful, but hard work remains.
It comes as little surprise to me, but it’s now apparent that the .co launch has been successful. As of now, 279,000 .co domain names have been registered. I calculate gross sales of about $19 million to date.
There are a number of reasons I’m not surprised by the initial success of .co. I outlined many of these in my last newsletter. But regardless of how or why it has charged out of the gate, and regardless of how much time, money, and ingenuity has gone into the process, it all starts over now. The long term viability of any top level domain name isn’t determined in the first week. It’s determined in the ensuing years.
The number one driver: use and promotion by end users.
.Co already has some big coups in this area. Twitter is using t.co. Overstock bought o.co, although it’s not sure what it will do with it. Go Daddy plans to use x.co.
But what will be interesting to watch is use by other companies. Will any of them actually use it for unique and new web sites? Will they advertise them on TV? Will small businesses say “find us at xyz.co”?
I can’t think of any “new” TLD that has been successful by this measure. Yes, .biz is a great business for Neustar. And .info is a cash cow for Afilias. But are they successful? Will they wilt under the pressure of hundreds of competing TLDs in the coming years?
Given the thought and money behind the launch, I know .co is thinking about this. The work has only just begun.
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Tags: .co
Andrew – One point of clarification. .INFO is NOT a cash cow for Afilias — .ORG is.
.co is hype like all tld launch in the past and for the future. Dot com will always stay .com, just try to advertise like you said above with a site .co, you’ll see people react as “hey it’s a typo, the “m” is missing and they type the .com LOL
so did they just make a return already?
I got cocaine.co , need to setup an export biz and capitalize on a category killing domain! Wish me luck
If overstock uses o.co then slowly but surely
.co will take off and believe me every new thing coming in 20th century is smaller and shorter.
The only reason I bought .co is to protect my .com Domain, never to create a website I am sure 80% of the registrant did the same.
It would have been nice (fair?) to also have .INC in the “game” at this time.
If .CO becomes a burr in the .COM armor we may see a major network fracture in the making. The .COM owners will become more vocal about their brands and what they view as challenges to “their traffic”.
IF .CORN were allowed in the “game” people may begin to see the foolishness of the years of debates about ASCII strings.
http://domainnamewire.corn
@ CashCow – .org is PIR. .Info is Afilias.
On Cash.COW (not .COM)…
there are spread-sheets that track where every penny goes in
http://TheBigLieSociety.com
It is surprising that domain name “experts” do not know the Cash.COW flows.
.co is of significance to us in the State of Colorado, and scoring a bunch of marijuana related .co’s like http://marijuanaphotos.co is good news, I also got 420.co and mymarijuana.co and coloradomarijuana.co
@Andrew – Afilias runs the registry backend for PIR
Thanks Andrew! You are absolutely right.
Now the real work begins